I wonder if the $10/mo price of Spotify has anchored listeners to a low price that Spotify can't get out of. Spotify will need to pull more money in to be able to give musicians more money per stream. Even if they were able to increase revenues, musicians will need to be able to claim a bigger part of that pie.
How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
81–90 of 162 posts
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#82In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up. Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much le…
> The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. Citation needed My understanding is that total spending on recorded music is way down from heights in the 90's. I could be wrong though.
https://www.recode.net/2014/3/18/11624668/the-price-of-music
Cherry picking from the article from 2014:
> At the 1999 peak ... according to the music trade group International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, across the total 18-and-over population (both across many countries or individually within one), the average amount spent came to $28 per consumer.
Moving on:
> But that includes people who did not buy any music that year. If we look at just the consumers who bought music, they spent $64 on average that year.
> Another study by NPD Group in 2011 found similar spending, about $55 per music buyer per year on all forms of recorded music
Note, that's all forms of music.
> about $12 per iTunes account per quarter is spent on music, or about $48 per year.
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#83From my understanding, Spotify's recommendations have a major flaw - they're based off other users' listening data. What this means is that if a song isn't listened to by very many people it'll never be recommended, and many songs on Spotify don't even have a single stream, let alone however many it takes to get the data to make it a recommendation.
Luckily, the author outlines the fact that many of Spotify's playlists are curated by humans and when you submit an album to Spotify, you highlight a single track for a human to listen to. It is very possible to catch the ear of a human at Spotify and be placed on playlists, which is a spark that ignites more listenership.
How does one land a job as one of these playlist curators?
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#84In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up. Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much le…
> The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. Citation needed My understanding is that total spending on recorded music is way down from heights in the 90's. I could be wrong though.
We're still down from the 90s heights, but increasing rapidly: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. Citation needed My understanding is that total spending on recorded music is way down from heights in the 90's. I could be wrong though.
We're still down from the 90s heights, but increasing rapidly : https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/
Yeah that looks like what I would have guessed, I actually made my living in the music business from 1997-2010 or so.
The recent uptick is certainly interesting though.
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#86It would be interesting to see the bump you get in listeners post HN front page.
It's a nice uptick— I have ~60 real-time Spotify listeners right now (usually it's around 25 this time of day).
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#87I'm glad Spotify has opened up as a new revenue stream for musicians but it's a laughably small amount of revenue for how much work it is to compose/record hours of original music. Live music is still king for making money. As an amateur pianist myself, $400 isn't a lot of money per month. I can pull $100/hr in an afternoon at a classy gig playing Classical/Jazz/Folk/Pop, you do that once per week and you're well ove…
The thing about recorded songs or videos is, the income compounds and has a chance to grow exponentially over time. The same is not true for you going around and playing music.
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly this. And this is exactly the reason why we'll probably all end up pirating movies again. Pretty much everything mainstream (with the exception of a few artists) is on Spotify. Netflix, Amazon, etc etc. get more fractured every day. Every studio wants their own streaming service. How many will you pay for? 2? 1? 0? Everybody loses.
oh theres places to get all the shows streamed for free, and getting even the pirating the most obscure music is easier than ever piracy is currently the most convenient way to consume content now that all the streaming services/labels want to fragment their libraries
I don't think we're quite there yet. Assuming a title is on a streaming service that I have a subscription to, piracy is definitely not more convenient.
I guess for someone starting from scratch, "what streaming service(s) should I should I subscribe to?" might be a difficult and paralyzing question to the point that the answer might be, "who knows, screw it, I'll just pirate everything".
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#89In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up. Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much le…
Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore, or at least not nearly as much as I needed to before. I only pirate music in cases where it's not available on Spotify (and that piracy is usually in the form of youtube-dl).
Re: How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first. Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was hard . Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer. Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated convenience . And Convenience i…
I’ve given up trying to understand this. For me, buying a physical disc, transferring the files to my computer, and either putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices is so easy. Amazon music downloads & Bandcamp downloads are even easier. What’s not easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices, and either manage caching music local to the device (and f…
So, for me, I want to listen to good music, but I don't want to curate a collection. I certainly don't want to deal with the hard parts of starting a collection where I have to buy a bunch of albums at once to have variety; I also don't care to do the work of finding new things to listen to.
I want a radio experience, where some nice person somewhere else (or an algorithm, whatever) picks music for me. Bonus points if they don't come on after every song to tell me all about whatever. I'm not worried about the cost or inconvenience of using cellular data services to stream music, that's the primary reason I have a data plan.
I use a curated streaming service, but I can see the appeal of Spotify, because thanks to the mandatory licensing regime, they can literally stream any released music in a radio context; and having access to everything is amazing. When Launchcast was a thing, it's recommendation engine was pretty great, although they lacked depth in the genre's I want to listen to; I strongly suspect Spotify does too.